You probably stopped making meaningful progress roughly 10-15 years ago, so you are disillusioned about all basic concepts that pertain to weight training. Seriously, you are making thread about "reps". You lost your mind years ago. Soon you will be Mike Mentzer, obsessing over the past until it kills you.
I make "progress" all the time, in that i learn how to warm up a little better, hurt myself a little less, waste a little less time, or sometimes even get a little stronger. I don't need numbers for these things, and the outside observer would probably just laugh at me and say "okay buddy..." -- you're right.
But does the story change if I start counting reps? You think I would suddenly be "adding five pounds to my bench" or consistently "adding one more rep per set", if only I started counting numbers.
Let's say you're right. How long can anyone keep "progressing" like this?
Like most people, I'm not going to follow some byzantine periodic scheme which maps out the next two years of my life. That leaves me to simple plans like, "well, I lifted four reps last workout and so I'm gonna try for five reps this week." Sure, this plan works great for a year or two, but then what? If we could all add any meaningful amount of anything every session, we'd be benching five thousand pounds ten years in.
Let's take a modest example. Say you do three sets of ten. When you can do all sets with good form, you add five pounds. Maybe you get something like 10, 9, 7 reps the next workout; 10,10,8 the next; and 10,10,10 again the third session. Is this too ambitious? After years of listening to and reading gym stories, I think most people call plans like this "reasonable". It works out to about 5 pounds a month.
The improvements each session are about as minuscule as anyone has the attention span for, I think, and this still works out to sixty pounds a year. So after five years, I've added 300 lbs to my bench?
lol... the reality is, do everything right and you can max out in a couple years, then goodbye "progress" in the sense of adding more weight or reps. So what do you do for the next ten, twenty, thirty years? Follow some increasingly arcane and "unfalsifiable" workout plan, claiming you're "making progress"?
